Poland wrestles with manual labor shortage

With unemployment hovering around 15 percent, it's hard to fathom how Poland could lack able bodies for work. But last fall, Filip Wilczynski pushed back an office building renovation by two months because he couldn't find workers to install the plumbing or lay bricks and tiles.

"Everybody's left for Britain or Ireland," said Wilczynski, who runs a gravel and construction company in Ostroleka, a small city 75 miles north of Warsaw. "There's nobody left to hire."

Lured by higher wages in Western Europe, doctors, architects and nurses have bolted since Poland joined the European Union in 2004. Some officials are warning of a brain drain to Poland's richer EU cousins.

But "brawn drain" is also taking a toll. Many employers have been left shorthanded, especially in the country's booming construction industry.

"It's difficult to find people because the vast majority of good workers has left," Wilczynski said. "Either the people here don't want to or just aren't capable of the work. I would need two supervisors for every worker just to make sure they know what they're doing."

On a muddy construction site in downtown Warsaw recently, electrician Robert Siudek was gazing up at the luxury apartment buildings covered in scaffolding rising around him.

"There's a ton of work right now, and not enough people to do it," said Siudek, who worked in France for five years before returning to Poland last February. "I think builders here would take almost anybody that came along."

He's contemplating a return to Paris in early 2007, where he says he could earn $3,400 a month.

"Nobody's going to pay me that much here," he said, adding that he brings in around $850 a month in Poland.

According to rough estimates, up to 1 million Poles have left this country of 38 million since it joined the EU in May 2004. (There are no official figures.)

"There is a large lack of workers in the Polish construction industry," said Zbigniew Bachman, director of the country's construction chamber of commerce. "We're talking about bricklayers, roofers, fitters, crane operators, bulldozer drivers, and operators of other equipment for building roads or buildings."

But the exodus west isn't the only culprit. The shuttering of technical schools that once trained the industry's labor, coupled with an ongoing building boom amid strong economic growth at 5 percent annually, has also squeezed construction companies.

Bachman said his association estimates the industry could absorb an additional 150,000 workers. But the question is where to find so many pairs of working hands.

Industry officials have called on Poland's government to open the country's labor market to workers from the east -- Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria -- to help fill the gap.

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's government plans to adopt a Labor Ministry recommendation to open Poland's market to workers from Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU on Jan. 1.

The Labor Ministry is also drawing up a proposal that would streamline procedures allowing Ukrainians to work in Poland. (Poland maintains restrictions against countries not allowing Polish workers to enter.)

Warsaw hopes to have the new rules in place by early spring, in time for the start of the agriculture and construction season.

Last year, Kaczynski signed a deal abolishing double taxation for the growing number of Poles working in Britain, a move that may encourage some Poles to return home.

The ministry acknowledges the manpower shortage, and also argues that Poland's unemployment figures are inflated. It says some Poles working abroad still claim unemployment benefits at home, as do those working under the table in Poland, pushing up the jobless figure.

Estimates of the real unemployment rate range from 9 percent to 12 percent.

Unemployment tied to Poland's communist past also is a factor, the ministry says.

A sizable chunk of aging laborers who once worked the country's sprawling communist farms or large factories -- both of which have crumbled since the jump to a capitalist democracy in 1989 -- are essentially unemployable in the new economy.

Source:courier-journal.com